Digital watermarking technology, a form of steganography, encompasses a great variety of techniques by which plural bits of digital data are hidden in some other object without leaving human-apparent evidence of alteration. Many such techniques are detailed in the cited documents.
In accordance with one embodiment of the present invention, watermarking is employed to facilitate e-commerce transactions. More particularly, watermarking is employed to assure that an on-line purchaser of goods has physical custody of the credit card being charged. Without such custody, the requested transaction will be refused by the credit card issuer.
One particular embodiment is a method of conducting commerce over the internet between a user and a vendor, where the user has a credit card with a credit card number. The method includes providing the credit card number from the vendor to a credit card approval authority; and authorizing a charge to the credit card number only after demonstrating to said approval authority that the user has physical custody of the credit card. Custody can be demonstrated by sensing image data corresponding to the face of the credit card. The method may include steganographically decoding a plural-bit payload from the sensed image data, and may further include confirming a predetermined relationship between that payload and the credit card number.
The foregoing and other features and advantages of the present invention will be more readily apparent from the following detailed description, which proceeds with reference to the accompanying drawings.